


A Slow Homecoming

by Lena7142, Sororising



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Mention of gaslighting, Minor Body Horror, Period-Typical Homophobia, Reverse Big Bang Challenge, Self-Harm, Steve-centric, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 02:57:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11221845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lena7142/pseuds/Lena7142, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/pseuds/Sororising
Summary: The bones were first.Steve never tells anyone that, because he knows it doesn’t make sense; knows he isn’t supposed to remember anything at all.But the bones were first.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so excited to be sharing this, the first fic I have managed to write all year! (I had excellent inspiration, as you'll see). A huge thank you to Lena ([portraitoftheoddity](http://portraitoftheoddity.tumblr.com/) on tumblr), for said inspiration! And thank you so much as well to the mods of the Cap Reverse Big Bang, I'm very glad I signed up and am hoping this will inspire me to start writing a little more this year!
> 
> This is quite different from my usual fics in that I usually focus on a range of characters, whereas this one is mostly a character study of Steve, and is only from his point of view. It does get angsty, but not entirely, and I really hope you enjoy it. One small note: there's a couple of descriptions that might border on body horror, but it isn't too graphic and the tag is mostly a just in case one. I'm always willing to add and update tags if there's any I missed!

* * *

Steve is twelve years old. He's holding his ma's hand as gently as he can, even though every part of him wants to clutch her tight and beg her not to leave him. She's telling him some story, about two men that lived in their building, how they got arrested and charged for – what? Being in love? He doesn't think that sounds right, but he won't say a word against his ma right now.

“Stevie. My darling.” Her voice is so weak. He bites the inside of his cheek, bites down hard so that if he cries it will be because of something realer than his ma's quiet words. “Steve, promise me. Please, don't be – don't be like them.” She breaks off in a fit of coughing; each breath she takes is violent, as though her lungs are struggling to keep her anchored to her body. He knows it won't be long now. Hours at best. Maybe minutes.

He thinks of Bucky. He can picture the curve of his lips better than he could his own. He can imagine the little twitch that means Bucky's trying not to laugh, maybe 'cause they're in church and Father Thomas has his eye on them. He can see the way Bucky's lips go just a touch too still when he's upset and trying so hard not to let it show.

He can see every shift of muscle in Bucky's arms, every shade his skin turns throughout the year, from his December white when the landlord won't switch the heat on to the soft sprinkle of freckles on darker skin in August. He sees the callouses on Bucky's hands, the nails that are kept neatly trimmed even when they're caked in dirt from his part-time job down at the docks. The way his hair seems like the same shade all over until Bucky stands in sunlight, when Steve knows different strands light up golden even though everyone tells him he doesn't know what colours really are.

He might not see colour the way the rest of the world can, but he knows he sees Bucky in ways they never will. And he wouldn't trade that for anything.

Unless.

If it was his ma asking. If he was sat here, on her deathbed, and she asked him for just this one promise. Sarah Rogers was - is - the most selfless person Steve could ever imagine. He knows how much she's given up for him, and he knows she wouldn't take a second of it back. He loves her with his whole heart, with everything he has in him. He loves her in the way he loves only one other person.

He swallows, trying to clear his throat. He tastes blood from somewhere. Must have bitten down too hard.

He feels a faint pressure on his hands. His ma, letting him know that she's still here for him. Till the end, the way she always has been.

“I promise, Ma. I promise.” His voice is clear, which startles him for a moment. He should be crying, surely, or pleading with God to give her a second chance. Instead he feels nothing but calm, a steady peace building inside him.

She smiles, then. Not at him. At something he can't see, not yet. He hopes that it's light, where she's going, and warm. There should be trees, and birdsong, and no more broken heaters or medical bills or cruel landlords.

He knows he'll never see Ireland, but he saw a picture of it in a library book once. He thought it looked beautiful already, and then Bucky had leaned over and said in an awed voice: “There's so much green, Steve! It's like all the green in the world just up and moved to your ma's country. Lucky them.” And since then Ireland had sounded just the same as Paradise, to Steve.

“I love you.”

If he hadn't been leaning close to her with his good ear, he would never have heard those words leave her, whispering into the air along with the last breath she would ever take. 

She went in peace, in the end, and he knows he will forever be grateful for that.

The bite mark on the inside of his cheek ends up scarring over. He runs his tongue along it every so often. Maybe he does it a little more around Bucky, but probably it's just a coincidence. It's just a habit, he tells himself. Not a reminder.

It's the first thing he notices, after the pain from the serum injections has worn off and he steps out of the machine, reborn. He goes to run his tongue over the mark instinctively, and when he finds only smooth skin he doesn't know if he feels regret or relief.

It doesn't matter. He doesn't need the scar to be present on his body for it to be real. It won't ever fade from his mind, even if he lives for a hundred years. He won't let it.

* * *

Steve was right all those years ago, he realises, the night after he’s rescued Bucky from Azzano and they’re camped out in some forest along the route back to camp. Bucky’s hair is a thousand different shades of brown and gold, and even far from clean it looks beautiful. But he was wrong, too. Bucky’s skin isn’t just white, now, it’s mottled with red pinpricks and purple-yellow bruises, and angry indents from where Bucky struggled against his restraints. 

Steve had always figured that a world with colour had to be more beautiful than one without, even though Bucky never liked it when he said things like that. Bucky said that if the world Steve was seeing wasn’t the best one it could be then he didn’t want any part of his colours, which had seemed like a kind gesture at the time.

But Steve has seen red now, red as it bursts from split arteries and torn veins. He’s seen it dry on the ground and on his uniform to a dull rusty brown. He’s seen the stumps of limbs, amputated by a hundred pieces of merciless shrapnel, ringed by purpled rotting flesh. And once he saw a body, left out for so long that the skin had stiffened into a greenish-grey colour that made bile rise up in his throat.

The world is divided, these days, into those who wait and those who fight. And Steve can’t help but think that it’s no coincidence that the people waiting see the war only in muted greys and blacks, in half-staged photographs that they print in their thousands and stack up on newsstands across the world. It’s the way he would have seen the world for the rest of his life, if he hadn’t wanted so badly to be a soldier. His change in vision has come along with a larger change in perception. He’s seen so much of the brutality the world has to offer now, and every moment of it has been in perfect, vivid technicolour.

On bad days, Steve feels like he would trade every colour in the universe if only he and Bucky could be back in Brooklyn. In a world where they have troubles of their own and where everything he sees is black and white, but where he knows they can be safe.

* * *

After the train, his hand feels as though it will never stop reaching into the frozen air over a snow-covered valley in Austria. There is a scream still trapped in his throat that he knows will live there until he draws his last breath. And every colour seems to burn his eyes with a vibrance that he thinks he can never find beautiful again. How can there be colour, still, in a world without Bucky? 

He hadn’t lied to a single enlistment officer about why he wanted to be a soldier, only about everything else. He had wanted to fight for his country, and help defeat injustice, and it was a core truth of him that he really didn’t like bullies. But deep down, he knew that he would have stopped after the first few rejections if it hadn’t been for Bucky. 

He couldn’t bear the thought of waiting behind, of having half his heart - because that was what it felt like, as though something had been ripped out of his chest from the moment he saw the letter telling Bucky to report for duty - across the ocean, in a war that some were already saying could only be lost, or else won but at too high a price. 

If Bucky was out there, laying his life on the line, sacrificing his freedom, Steve would be there alongside him, no matter what it took.

So it’s Bucky he has to thank, in the end, for his colours. Which makes it all the more painful when they don’t fade away when he’s gone. Steve’s body is still absurdly healthy: he can’t run himself into exhaustion or drink himself into a stupor; he can’t distract himself with the chronic pain that had been as familiar to him as breathing for most of his life. All he can do is endure, and bite down on his cheek with the knowledge that when he next wakes it will be as though the new mark he has created never existed.

* * *

Regret and relief battle in his mind once more as he turns the nose of the Valkryie towards the sea. Regret, because he does love Peggy, more than he thought he was capable of. She’s fierce and brave and astoundingly beautiful, and he can almost imagine a world where they grow old together, protecting the world and each other till the end.

And below that lies the relief. He doesn’t know where Bucky is now. When his ma had passed away he had still been a child, had held firm in his faith in the Paradise that awaited her. Since then he feels like he’s walked through hell a thousand times over, and he knows that the things he’s been through are nothing compared to the stories of some of the other soldiers. 

So maybe Bucky is waiting for him, somewhere beyond the horizon. Soon they could be together again, holding each other close, Bucky gently mocking him: _couldn’t even make it through a week without me, punk, what am I gonna do with you?_

But it might be that Steve will go down alone, into the ice, and when the slow frost creeps along the wings of the plane and his lungs can take in nothing but water, those breaths will be final in all ways. It feels like the worst blasphemy to even think it; he has grown up with the solemn truth of _in this world and the next,_ but in those final moments his thoughts are _there is no world for me, without Bucky,_ and whether he is destined for oblivion, or Paradise, or something beyond his imagination, Steve is calm as the plane breaks the surface, and he sinks down with peace in his eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now the best chapter!! Because it is the ART CHAPTER!!!

* * *

The twenty-first century is loud, and bright, and everything that Steve isn’t anymore. He can’t picture this world in gray any more than he could have pictured Brooklyn in colour when he was young. He feels wildly out of place here. He can’t help but think that Bucky should have been the one to wake up in a new world, with Steve having died long ago, a frozen skeleton now on the slopes of a distant mountain.

He goes back to Brooklyn, of course, after the battle for New York. And isn’t that something, that after scrapping for a few inches of mud in places in France that he doesn’t think he could name anymore, he’s fought now to protect the only place he ever called home. _The Battle For New York._ It sounds like something out of an old comic book, with panels stamped out in glaring reds and blues showing the glorious triumph of the brightly-costumed superheroes over the ugly, monstrous aliens. 

Brooklyn doesn’t feel like home. He’d been prepared for that, of course. He was seeing it decades later, in colours that he’d imagined but never actually seen. But even so, some part of him had expected some deeper sense of familiarity to come through, and when it doesn’t he learns that there is yet another way his heart can be broken.

Exercise is one of the only ways he can find to shut off the intrusive thoughts - _should have been me, why was I the one spared, it should have been -_

He punches the bag again, and again, and again. This basement reminds him a little of the old boxing gym where Bucky used to train. He’d tried to teach Steve a thing or two, when the calls for enlistment had gone out. 

Steve knows Bucky had mostly just been humouring him, and he’d known it then too, but he still likes those memories. Some days they feel clearer in his head than the war does. 

Other times he can’t think of anything but war.

Another bag breaks. 

He looks down at his hands. They look grey in the half-light. 

Everything had looked grey once. Skin, sky. 

Even blood.

The bones were first. 

Steve never tells anyone that, because he knows it doesn’t make sense; knows he isn’t supposed to remember anything at all.

But the bones were first.

He had felt them crack and spread, in one wrenching, rending moment that must have only lasted a second. So much pain condensed into something so small. From a scientific point of view he guesses he’s wrong - surely the serum working from the inside out would have caused more damage than it fixed? - but somewhere inside him is an echo, visceral and still-raw, that tells him he isn’t.

A lot of different people have described his transformation in a lot of different ways over the decades.

 _Remade_ seems to be the one that’s stuck.

It feels accurate, most of the time.

He hooks up a new bag, and starts over. Punches in an even rhythm and doesn’t stop. Until - 

There.

The skin over his knuckles splits open as he hits a seam of the bag.

Red.

Finally.

* * *

* * *

He moves to DC, because it’s what people are expecting of him. For most of his life people had just been expecting him to die; it’s hard for him not to feel obligated when there’s something real he can do. There’s a job waiting for him there, with SHIELD, but he turns it down for now. Tony had offered him his own floor in the skyscraper of Stark Tower, but Steve had refused as politely as he could. He doesn’t need a floor; he barely needs the small apartment he rents through a SHIELD-trusted agency. He needs peace, and time, and he needs to not have his ghosts staring him in the face every time he turns the corner. He knows that Tony can tell how hard it is for Steve to look past Howard, and he hopes that given time they can work through their differences.

Time isn’t a luxury that Steve has much experience with. _Born with one foot in the grave,_ people used to say about him, and after the serum the only waiting around he had time for was the kind that came before an attack.

He doesn’t know if it’s leftover habits from his old army life - such a misleading phrase, as though the war really were decades ago instead of weeks - or just plain boredom, but he falls into a routine within the first few days.

Wake. Eat. Run. Eat. Shower. Check world isn’t ending. Eat. Catch up on years of history. Work out. Eat. Shower. Eat. Sleep.

Some days he makes the trip out to Peggy’s care home. Surprisingly, his visits there are more sweet than bitter. Having someone who knows him, inside as well as out, is the kind of pain he welcomes these days, the kind that comes from picking at a half-healed wound you can’t quite leave alone.

He happens to read an article about Stonewall on an otherwise unremarkable day, and spends the rest of that week catching up on queer history in the twentieth century. He cries bitter tears when he learns about the AIDS crisis and the myriad of ways the country he was once proud to fight for failed their people, and when he turns his research towards the present day, he doesn’t know whether to break down in more tears or to cry with laughter instead.

There are so many possibilities that he could never have begun to dream of as a boy: marriage and children and serving openly in the armed forces, and yet somehow it all seems like _not enough_ and _too little, too late._ He wonders for a desperate moment what Sarah Rogers would have said if she had lived through these decades instead of her own, whether her dying wish - except she might not have been dying, he thinks with a fierce stab of pain, if she had been born into a world with access to vaccinations - would have been for him to love openly and true, but he knows that it doesn’t matter what she could have said; the words she spoke are his truth, and he carries them with him even in this new world.

The rest of his interactions with people are brief. He stays in touch with Tony sporadically, and after a while he ends up accepting Fury’s offer to work for SHIELD. He lets his new team joke around with him, but he keeps them at a carefully manufactured distance. They aren’t the Howlies, they never can be, and it isn’t like he’s punishing them for echoing the voices of long-dead men - it’s just more than he can bear to try to slip back into that role.

So he creates a new one for himself. A new costume comes along with it, of course - he’s never been able to get out of the habit of thinking about them as costumes rather than uniforms - updated for the modern day, understated but still patriotic enough for Captain America to be seen in it.

The days go by. They feel nothing but unremarkable, even those that end in bloody battles. He’s reunited with Natasha, who he’s surprised to find an odd kind of kinship with, and eventually he starts to measure time in days rather than hours, and then weeks rather than days.

He keeps his routine until it turns into something almost like a life, until he’s spent more time in this century than he had fighting in the war.

And then he meets Sam, the first friend he’s made in decades without intervention from anyone else, and he starts to think that he might be able to find a place for himself in this new world after all.

And then everything comes crashing down around him, once again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're on tumblr please take a moment to [reblog the incredible art](http://portraitoftheoddity.tumblr.com/post/161938188754/should-have-been-me-why-was-i-the-one-spared-it) before the next chapter, I feel so lucky I got to write for it!


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

Even as he’s ducking blows that would knock even him off his feet, and struggling to find an opening to move in for an attack, Steve can’t shake the feeling that there’s something familiar about his opponent.

The Winter Soldier. The name sends a shiver down his spine. He’s heard the words a hundred times; he had even learnt the most famous part by heart for history class at school.

_The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this time of crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he who stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman._

If the summer soldier surrenders and walks away from people in need, Steve thinks that he himself relates a lot more to a winter soldier. Which is a strange thought to have, when he’s currently trying not to be killed by someone who has taken on that name.

A quote from one of the most famous American activists of all time is also an unusual choice of moniker for someone who, by all accounts, was first heard of as an operative for the Soviet Union.

Not that it can be the same man, of course. The Winter Soldier must be a mantle passed down over the years, from person to person. Not that different from Captain America, really. Steve doesn’t fool himself that if he dies or is permanently incapacitated the government will let the symbol die. He’d already heard from Peggy of numerous failed attempts to create more of him over the past decades. Captain America doesn’t belong to Steve Rogers.

Natasha and Sam are in this fight with him, but for the moment they’re both occupied with various HYDRA grunts, who go down easy but keep crawling out of a row of black vans that gets longer every time Steve glances over at it.

So it’s just the two of them, on the bridge, when the Winter Soldier’s mask falls and Steve looks into the face of a ghost.

It’s a glimpse, nothing more. Steve manages to choke out one word and the Soldier stiffens, then grabs his mask and runs. He disappears within seconds, and Steve knows he wouldn’t be able to track him even if he wanted to.

Steve doesn’t move, the echo of that word - the one that he feels is carved into his heart - still lingering in the air.

Bucky.

Natasha is the first to approach him.

“Steve?” She sounds cautious. Rightly so, he imagines. He can’t picture the expression on his face, but from the way she’s looking at him he doubts it’s anything good.

He opens his mouth to reply, then closes it again in frustration. He doesn’t know anything for sure. It was only a glimpse.

Something strikes him then, and he meets Natasha’s eyes.

“Did - did you ever meet him? In the Red Room, I mean?”

She raises her eyebrows, clearly taken by surprise. Steve takes a moment to be grateful that she trusts him enough to show some of what she’s thinking; he’s aware that if she wanted to she could keep her face expressionless in almost any situation.

“He trained us, sometimes. But they kept him frozen, most of the time.”

“Frozen?”

“Cryo chamber. They only woke him up for missions, but sometimes he would spar with us to make sure he was operating at top capacity.”

Operating at top capacity. It’s a phrase that would sound so much more at home if she was talking about a machine.

Steve jumps as he hears a sound behind him. He spins round to see Sam, and Steve realises that he hadn’t even checked to see if Sam and Natasha needed back-up. They’re fine, obviously, and the fighting must be over or else they wouldn’t have come to meet him. But he still feels like he’s let them down.

“Wilson,” Natasha says, nodding at Sam.

Sam grins. “Nice work out there. Hey, Steve.”

Steve gives Sam an awkward little wave but doesn’t say anything. There isn’t really a good way to say that instead of checking in with his teammates and maybe going for a drink with them, he’d really like to keep listening to stories about the leather-clad assassin who had just spent the day trying to brutally murder him.

“Not so bad yourself,” Natasha says with a quick smile. “I was just giving Steve a bit of backstory on our enemy.”

_Enemy._

“Mind if I listen in? Seems I’ve got myself caught up in this now, might as well know what I’m dealing with.”

Thank you, Sam.

Natasha shrugs. “Sure, but there’s not much more to say. He was almost a mythical figure to us. He obeyed orders without question, and he - well, he was the best. That’s all there is to it.”

Steve thinks he can detect a hint of hidden admiration in Natasha’s words.

“You said he was - frozen, when they didn’t need him,” he says, hating every word that comes out of his mouth. “So you don’t know how old he is? Or where he’s from?”

Natasha looks curious at all the questions Steve’s asking, but she doesn’t seem to take it as anything other than a soldier trying to do some reconnaissance. At least outwardly, anyway.

“Well, he’s Russian,” she says. Steve tries to keep his face expressionless. “At least, he’s fluent in the language. And it would be highly unlikely that they would have recruited from other countries at that time. I have no idea how old he is, either biologically or in terms of his birth, but I first heard stories about him in the early sixties. He always wears the mask. I’ve never seen his face.”

“Man out of time. Just like you, Cap,” Sam says, the not-unkind words a quiet knife between Steve’s ribs.

“Yeah.” It’s all he can manage to say.

* * *

A few days later, Steve thinks of something that might be able to help him. He rings Natasha, hoping that the number she gave him is still the right one.

She picks up immediately, and thankfully Natasha isn’t one for small talk so she asks straightaway why he called.

“Is there video footage? Of the fight on the bridge?

There’s a pause before Natasha replies. “I can find out for you. But why? Even if we see which way he went, he was trained in espionage as well as combat. There’s no way he didn’t double back on himself a dozen times between there and wherever he headed.”

He hadn’t come up with an excuse in advance, and he panics for a moment before thinking of something that might sound plausible.

“I wanted to analyse his fighting style. See if he has any weaknesses that can be used against him.”

“That could be useful. Good thinking.” She sounds surprised. “Steve, are you sure you’re okay? You’ve seemed a little off since that fight.”

Shit. She couldn’t suspect anything. 

“I’m fine,” he says, trying to sound calm. “It’s just - if anyone else had tried to go up against him, anyone but me or you, I don’t think they would have survived. I don’t want to see people get hurt. It should be me that takes him on.”

If there’s even the smallest chance that the Soldier is Bucky, then that means that Steve abandoned his friend to seventy years of torture and brainwashing at the hands of people who didn’t believe he was human. If anyone deserves to be in the line of fire, it’s Steve.

“Oh, Cap,” Natasha says, and he can already tell she’s taking his explanation at face value. “Always the hero.” 

It should make him feel proud, to have lied to one of the best spies in the world and got away with it. Instead he just feels numb.

* * *

It turns out that either HYDRA or B - the Soldier had taken out the traffic cameras with a few well-aimed bullets, so Steve can’t replay the moment in any way other than the constant loop that’s running inside his head.

He had a good memory and an excellent eye for detail - honed through years of playing at being an artist - even back when he was just a kid from Brooklyn. The serum had enhanced that, giving him a high precision eidetic memory.

It had been useful, back in the war. The ability to glance at a map or a building layout for a few moments and be able to recall it hours later in near-perfect detail, combined with a head for strategy, meant that the Howling Commandos could be sent on missions that otherwise would have needed half an army. Steve was glad that he could be of use; not being able to help people effectively had always been one of the worst parts of being sick half the time. The feeling of no longer being a burden took months to sink in for him; he would forever be grateful to Dr Erskine for seeing something in him where the rest of the world - with a few notable exceptions - saw a waste of food and shelter.

But his transformation hadn’t come without a cost. Steve had never been able to tell anyone about the negative side effects that came along with the serum. He had felt so ungrateful when he wished once that everything would just stop, that the sounds and smells all around him that his new senses couldn’t help but pick up on would fade into the background like they always used to.

Every night he closed his eyes, whether he was listening to the snoring of the Howling Commandos and lying on a bed of hard earth, or secure in his own room back at the base, with a thin mattress only marginally more comfortable than the ground, he saw them.

It wasn’t the maps and reports that came back to him in those moments. It was the bodies, lying broken and gutted. The torn off limbs, still spurting blood in graceful arcs that seemed stamped into his brain. Rotting flesh from wounds left to fester for too long.

Every image was as vivid as the moment it had happened. Maybe even more so. He sometimes thought that his new brain enhanced not only his ability to perceive the world, but also reality itself. Not literally, not like in those cheap science fiction books that Bucky could read two of in an afternoon. But in his recollections he couldn’t help but wonder if the blood had really been that red, or if there had been exactly thirty-eight pieces of shrapnel embedded in that man’s torso or if that was just the number Steve’s brain had decided to picture.

His eyesight had been terrible before the serum. He hadn’t realised until afterwards just how bad it had been, just as he hadn’t been aware of the low-level hum of pain that accompanied him even on his best days until it was gone for good.

He’d always known that he couldn’t see as far as most people, and that words would blur on a page if he stared at them for long. That was one of the reasons he loved art, both looking at it and attempting to create it. Soft lines and shapes didn’t dance around as much as letters. 

And he had known in a vague, uncaring way that he didn’t see as many colours as most people - as Bucky did. But he hadn’t understood just how flawed his vision had been until he stepped out of that machine, reborn, and opened his eyes to a world that he rationally knew must be the same one he’d lived in before the procedure, but that was different in so many fundamental ways.

He’d had to go through that experience once more when he cracked open his eyes and heard a baseball game playing that turned out to be from another century. His century.

And he feels almost the same way now, replaying the scene on the bridge over and over in his mind. His worldview has shifted yet again, and he doesn’t know if he can trust his own perceptions anymore. Or if he ever could.

After the serum, when he’d had some time to readjust - which involved a lot of gently touching pillows without denting them, because he was secretly terrified of his newfound strength and of moving to embrace someone and hurting them instead - he had sat down and deliberately thought about the differences for a while.

The world was sharper, clearer. Brighter. Better in every way, he had supposed. But did that mean his world had been wrong, before? He had known he was inferior, in some sense, to most people, but that shouldn’t make his old self worse, should it? Just different.

Now, though, he can’t find it in him to think rationally about this. He’s stepped into a new reality yet again, one that he can’t quite bring himself to believe in. 

But -

If - if it is real, if what he saw was true, then it has the potential to be both the best and also most painful truth he can think of.

And if it isn’t - well, he’s lived through worse. He thinks.

No matter how much detail he conjures up, he can’t get the face of the Soldier to look at him for more than a split second.

* * *

He’s decided now that he must have been wrong, back on the bridge. It’s a conversation with Sam that makes him - almost - certain.

Steve isn’t particularly good at faking happiness, but most people tend to assume that he’s always been this way: the stoic, no-nonsense Captain. Stuck on his good old-fashioned values. 

Sam was different from the start; he treated Steve no differently than any other vet, and he had looked honestly upset when Steve had said that he didn’t know what made him happy.

So when Sam had asked him what was wrong, Steve had taken a long breath and let out the words he had been too scared to even think to himself on the exhale.

“The Winter Soldier - he reminded me of Bucky. My best friend.”

Sam’s face had softened instantly. “I know the feeling. Even now I look at the back of someone’s head in a crowd and almost call out for Riley. But it does get better, Steve. I know that sounds like an empty promise, but it does.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Sam.”

His voice hadn’t cracked once, even though he had felt as though he was pushing the words out through a mouthful of broken glass.

It’s normal, then. His mind playing tricks on him. Seeing the one person he had never been sure he could live without in the eyes of a stranger.

He still isn’t sure if he can. Oh, he’s perfectly capable of _existing_ without Bucky, of course, though he had only managed it for a few days back in 1945. But it’s been two years now since he was unfrozen, and he isn’t certain he can call what he’s been doing since then living.


	4. Chapter 4

* * *

Steve is in awe of Natasha’s courage in choosing to release SHIELD’s files to the public. To be stripped bare like that, to have a whole world of people know the secrets you’ve worked your entire life to keep hidden - he doesn’t know if he could have done the same thing, in her position.

Of course, his secrets aren’t exactly the kind that can be calculated and analysed, but still. 

The world already knows his name and his body; they don’t need to know his heart.

* * *

Steve assumes that their plan for the helicarriers won’t go smoothly. It’s always best to have that attitude; he learned it from the Howling Commandos. Then if things go wrong, you’re already better prepared for it than everyone else, and if everything somehow works out perfectly you can be pleasantly surprised.

Steve is fairly certain that the appearance of the Winter Soldier would count as something going badly wrong for pretty much anyone but him, but when he sees the light glinting off that metal arm out of the corner of his eye, he can’t stop a quick flash of relief from hitting him even as he’s bracing for the first blow.

The Soldier is back in his full face mask and goggles, barely an inch of skin uncovered. Steve is distracted during the fight, trying to match the picture in his mind of Bucky to this ruthless, almost robotic, man who fights as though it’s his sole purpose in life and he can’t imagine another one.

If - god, if this was Bucky, or some kind of shell of him, what must they have done to him to turn him into this? Steve can’t bring himself to imagine. 

He had found time for reading whenever he could, once he was able to focus on the letters, during the war. His experience of being a soldier was never quite the _months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror_ that he had heard about; he was too valuable to be kept out of action for long, and he was useful enough to be sent much further away for missions than the average soldier. But there was still downtime in-between missions and his next briefing, and even on the operations themselves there was often a lot of waiting around for cover of darkness, or for them to make notes on the exact routine that a group of sentries were following.

One of the books he carried around for moments of quiet was The Hobbit. Bucky had bought it for him in a bookshop in London, meaning to send it onto Steve back in Brooklyn. He’d even written a little note in the front:

_I hear this one’s about a little guy that tries to save the world or something? Figured you might have a few thoughts on that._

_Your friend - J.B.B._

But then had come Azzano, and the little book was left tucked inside Bucky’s spare uniform at the base. He had given it to Steve weeks after his rescue, with a shrug and a casual _guess you’re not so little anymore, but have it anyway_ that Steve saw right through.

“I’m still that guy, Buck,” he’d said with a lump in his throat. “Still your Steve.”

He’ll never know if Bucky had truly believed him.

It had felt like a small miracle every time he looked down at a page and the words didn’t swim in front of his eyes. He read whatever he could get his hands on back then, but The Hobbit was a not-so-secret favourite. The rest of the Howling Commandos made jokes about it, but they soon got into the swing of things when Steve started working out which dwarf best matched which Commando.

Decades later, from a shelf of books that had been carefully selected just for him - _just give the guy a fucking e-reader,_ he heard a junior agent whisper in the corridor outside his quarters; clearly not everyone had been fully briefed on just how far Captain America’s hearing extended - _Fury doesn’t want us to overwhelm him, what if he breaks down on us?_ \- had been the reply, and Steve tried to block the voices out by focusing very hard on the neat little row of spines in front of him.

The classics, he’d been told. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from giving the technician who had used that phrase a dry look; half the books in her pile hadn’t even been published before 1945.

And in amongst them were battered copies of all three Lord of the Rings novels.

He had picked them up with shaking hands. All the changes in the world that he’d been told about had seemed almost too large for him to grasp so far, though he tried not to let that show. Bombs wiping out cities, civil rights movements birthed and fought for while he slept, assassinations and massacres and a man walking on the moon - it was all so abstract to him that he wasn’t sure he would ever properly take it in, not in the way everyone wanted him to.

For some reason, knowing that the fantasy world he had loved so much had been added to - three more books, and each one looked longer than the Hobbit - was the start of his acceptance that his world was truly gone, and could never come back. While the seasons had whirled around his frozen almost-corpse, one man had sat down and written what everyone was now calling the classic fantasy epic of the century.

He had cried his way through a first reading, then gone all the way back to the first page and started again. 

He had asked if Tolkien had written anything else about that world, and had been answered with a laugh and an order placed for twenty more books. They were a lot more difficult to get through than the Lord of the Rings, but he had persevered - after all, other than living in the gym or catching up on a history that, overall, he wasn’t particularly sad to have missed, he didn’t have much to be doing with his time.

It’s such an absurd thing to be thinking of, as he grapples with the Soldier on a lurching platform high above DC, but his brain since the serum has run on ten tracks at once, flickering between ideas at a dizzying speed. He remembers how, in the Silmarillion, Tolkien had described how Elves, the most noble and beautiful of creatures, were taken captive and - what was it? - _by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved,_ until they had been transmogrified into the Orcs: a brutish, violent race who bled aggression and made it their mission to destroy those who were not like them.

That line had struck him then, and now it takes on a twisted, unthinkable new meaning. 

Steve should be dead by now, he knows that. They’re fighting hand-to-hand, when he can see a full arsenal of guns and knives strapped onto the Soldier’s body - and he has no doubt that there are many more weapons on him than just the visible ones. Yet for some reason, the Soldier hasn’t launched a killing blow, or made a move for a gun. Steve can’t help but feel that desperate hope that he had thought was buried rise up, but before he can speak - he doesn’t know what would come out of his mouth, probably nothing more than that one word again, _Bucky_ \- he’s stumbling and finds himself reaching out for anything - anyone - to hold on to.

As he slips from the carrier, he can’t help but wonder if this is the right end for him. All those years ago, watching Bucky fall from the train, he had felt as though it was his heart was plummeting to the ground as well. 

And now he’s the one falling, and he hopes for one terrible moment that it is Bucky watching him sink into the water.

It’s the most selfish thought he’s ever had.

* * *

He wakes up on the bank of the Potomac with no memory of pulling himself out the river. Maria tells him that it’s perfectly normal to lose some time, especially since he had probably lost consciousness shortly after rescuing himself.

But he remembers the moment he had closed his eyes and let the darkness take over, and he knows that he was still in the river. He’s been guilty of both overestimating and underestimating his capabilities in the past, but he’s certain that he couldn’t have dragged himself to shore.

He wishes people would stop telling him that everything his brain is doing is normal.

* * *

Part of him wants to stay in DC, away from his old city that feels almost entirely unfamiliar up close. He likes New York from a distance, still. The skyline hasn’t changed all that much over the years. Lots of new skyscrapers, of course, but they don’t look out of place. He’s read about the attacks on the World Trade Centre, and he thinks that the city probably looks more welcoming to him from afar than it would do to someone who had grown up seeing the Twin Towers.

It’s a strange thought.

But when he gets inside the streets and alleyways, any sense of belonging disappears. Plenty of individual buildings are the same, and there are even a couple of businesses that have lasted through the decades. But the overall smell and feel is nothing like the New York of his childhood. It isn’t unrecognisable - Steve thinks it would probably be better if it was; he hadn’t felt nearly as out of place in DC - but it’s not quite familiar enough to be friendly.

When he decides that he’s going to move back to Brooklyn now that he doesn’t have SHIELD to work with, he tells himself that it’s just because he’s homesick. He ignores the little voice that tells him being back there will only make him feel further away from the past, not closer to it, and that anyway he should be concentrating on making himself a part of this new future.

And if there are any remnants of hope that there is someone else out there who might still think of Brooklyn as home, somewhere deep down, he keeps them locked deep inside his mind.

He’s got his fair share of demons to cover them with, after all.


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

He reconnects with the Avengers, now that he’s back in New York. The ones who are around, at least. Nobody knows where Clint has disappeared to, and Natasha is away more often than not, rebuilding old identities and forging new ones. Thor is back in Asgard for the time being, though apparently he has Heimdall keeping watch for the next alien invasion. Steve tries not to think too hard about any of the implications that the very fact of Thor’s existence brings.

But there’s Tony, and Bruce, and Pepper Potts, who is apparently her own kind of superhero now. They’re all almost unbearably welcoming to him, and he feels guilty when he turns down the offer of living quarters in Stark Tower, but - well, he can’t tell Tony it’s because his security is _too_ good, so he just says that he’d like to be closer to home.

 _Home._ He’s half a mile and over seventy years away. He’s never felt less like he belongs somewhere in his life.

He does ask Pepper for help finding a Brooklyn apartment, and she directs him to a building that Tony owns but that only has a few residents at the moment. She implies that Tony had originally wanted to tear it down and build a more energy-efficient skyscraper in its place, but she had put her foot down when she had visited and seen the beautiful old brownstone, and Tony had instead paid for it to be converted into flats.

Steve’s apartment is tucked away on the ground floor. It can be accessed through the main lobby, but it also has a side door that faces onto an unused alley. His windows are mostly hidden by a large rhododendron bush, and Pepper offers to get it trimmed back but Steve tells her he likes it. He does accept her offer of added soundproofing and windows that you can only see through from the inside. He lets her think that it’s because of his nightmares and his need for privacy, and as far as he can tell she believes him. She has no reason not to, after all.

He settles in - as much as he’s ever going to, at least - within a week. He keeps the bare-bones furniture that came along with the apartment. He knows that his rent is criminally low for New York, but he had a hard time persuading Tony to accept any money at all, and - contrary to what everyone around him seems to think - he does have some awareness of when to pick his battles.

He goes over to the Avengers tower at least a couple of times a week. Sometimes Tony and Pepper are away, either off for some Stark Industries conference or on a tropical island holiday somewhere that Steve’s never heard of. But Bruce is always around, and as Steve gets to know him he finds that he genuinely enjoys spending time at the Tower.

Bruce is much more reserved than Tony, which suits Steve’s mood most days. He’s never quite certain of his welcome, not wanting to disturb an experiment or a complex calculation, but even if Bruce is in the middle of something when Steve arrives he just waves at a well-stocked shelf that sits next to a pair of comfy armchairs in the corner of the room, and Steve is more than content to sit and read until Bruce is done with his work.

The unspoken question that he knows everyone wants to ask him is always hovering in the air, an unwelcome guest that demands to be noticed and tended to.

_What are you going to do now?_

He doesn’t know, is the short answer. The long answer isn’t something he wants to admit even to himself: he doesn’t want to do anything, because building a new life for himself here would be too close to admitting that Bucky is - that he isn’t coming back.

Tony pushes, a little, but that’s just what Tony does, and Steve doesn’t take it too personally. Bruce gives him recommendations for techniques to calm his mind and clear his thoughts, and Pepper hints that if Steve ever wants to get professional help she would be more than happy to tie a therapist up in so many non-disclosure agreements that they wouldn’t want to breathe in the direction of the Tower.

But mostly, they’re just his friends, and he doesn’t know how to tell them how grateful he is for their presence in his life. 

He does find himself missing Sam occasionally, even though they still hardly know each other, and he makes a point of stopping by the DC VA on the days when he drives his motorbike up there to visit Peggy. He can tell that Sam thinks he should have stayed away from New York for a while longer, and because he isn’t wrong Steve has no idea how to argue with that, but they usually talk more about less emotional things. 

He can tell that most people in his life are on the verge of some kind of intervention - he knows he’s acting the same way he did right after he was unfrozen; he’s just not sure how to stop. He feels disconnected from everything.

Sam’s one of the only people in Steve’s life right now who doesn’t seem to have any kind of preconceptions about what he should be, and Steve is more grateful for that than he knows how to say.

* * *

He’s stayed for dinner at the Tower one evening and it’s pouring with rain when he leaves, so he decides to take the subway back home instead of walking. He doesn’t think anyone notices who he is; he’s taken some lessons in staying under the radar from Natasha - slightly more detailed than her previous tips of _wear a baseball cap and try not to look like you could punch through a tank_ \- and either they’re working or the New Yorkers he’s surrounded by are too polite, uncaring or tired to pay attention to him.

He needs something to focus on that isn’t the gentle rattle-and-sway of the train car - not really a train, he convinces himself, just an underground transport system that happens to look a bit like one - and he ends up testing his hearing by seeing how many of the lyrics he can make out from the music coming out of the headphones the girl standing closest to him is wearing.

He’s grown used to his new abilities, but they still strike him as a novelty when he tries to do something new with them like this. Before the serum he could barely hear out of one ear, and the other one had been far from perfect. He would have been overjoyed if he had been able to go to the pictures and catch every line spoken; realising that he can hear every word through the girl’s headphones even through the general noise and bustle of the subway seems like it’s almost too much.

He doesn’t know the song, of course. He isn’t even paying much attention to the actual words, until one phrase leaps out at him and he has to tense every muscle in his arm to stop his hand from making a dent in the metal pole he’s holding onto.

_The person you’d take a bullet for is behind the trigger._

It hits him like - god, no, not like a train; it hits him in the same way he’d felt the impact as the Valkryie had broken the surface of the ocean.

He moves on autopilot when they reach his stop, those words running through his mind in a looping pattern that he can’t switch off.

He takes off his cap on the walk between the subway station and his apartment building. It’s unlikely that anyone’s looking for him, but it’s possible. He knows that the sensible thing to do while there are still HYDRA agents running around would be to make it as hard as possible for him to be discovered, but if he’d been worried about what made the most sense he wouldn’t be living in Brooklyn right now. 

Once he’s back in his apartment, he takes his laptop out. He doesn't actually use it all that much; after two years he's more than comfortable with computers but for catching up on everything he’s missed he still finds that he prefers books recommended to him by his friends, rather than the endless information spirals and hooks of Wikipedia. 

As soon as it’s booted up and connected to the internet - which had been set up by Tony rather than Pepper, and could apparently only be hacked by eighteen people in the world - he types in the lyrics he remembers into the Youtube search box, automatically being careful not to press down on the keys too hard - he had broken one of Colonel Phillips’ radios back in the war by twisting a dial with slightly too much force - and hits enter.

The rest of the song doesn’t quite fit - _I miss missing you_ won’t ever apply to Steve; he can’t imagine a time ever coming where he doesn’t miss Bucky with everything in him.

And _before it gets better, the darkness gets bigger_ \- well, if that’s true then it implies something better has been right around the corner for years, and he can’t bring himself to hope for that.

But those first words that had struck him - he can’t stop hearing them in his mind, the refrain that somehow puts into one neat lyric every thought that’s been haunting him since the bridge.

_The person you’d take a bullet for is behind the trigger._

The website rolls over to another lyric video, by the same band. This time, the song is called _Centuries._

_Some legends are told_  
_Some turn to dust, or to gold_  
_But you will remember me_  
_Remember me, for centuries_  
_And just one mistake_  
_Is all it will take_  
_We’ll go down in history_  
_Remember me for centuries._

The lyrics are so -

He can’t put it into words; doesn’t know how he’d even begin to try. He’s always loved music, in the same way he’d loved art. It doesn’t matter too much that you’re mostly deaf in one ear when someone’s singing loud enough.

His favourite song from before the war comes back to him, one he hasn't thought about in a long time. _I Can Dream, Can’t I._ It was a Tommy Dorsey number, but when he types it into Youtube the first video that comes up is by the Andrews sisters, who he remembers from his USO days. Just like him, they had been part of a show encouraging people to buy war bonds; but unlike his attempts at playing the fool for soldiers, they had also been well-received as entertainment for the troops overseas. Monty Falsworth had seen them in person, Steve remembers, and he’d only had good - if a little lewd - things to tell the rest of the Commandos about the experience.

He’d never known that they’d covered this song, and he clicks the link after a moment of hesitation.

_I can see_  
_No matter how near you’ll be_  
_You’ll never belong to me_  
_But I can dream, can’t I_  
_Can’t I pretend_  
_That I’m locked in the bend of your embrace_  
_For dreams are just like wine_  
_And I am drunk with mine._

From the first swell of the music, he’s back in their one-room apartment, watching Bucky get ready for work. This song - he’d heard it for the first time at the dancehall, only last week - is playing through his mind on repeat. 

He had been so careful. He didn’t think Bucky had ever suspected anything. He had dreamed, of course he had, but he had kept those dreams hidden in the deepest part of his soul, locked and guarded, never meant to see the light of day.

After Bucky had been sent over to Europe, Steve had tried not to shut himself up in their apartment. He’d had his job still, thankfully, and he’d gone out for a drink some nights, caught up with a few acquaintances. But it wasn’t the same. As it turned out, it would never be the same again.

One night, someone had brought out the old record player at the bar nearest Steve’s place. They’d put on a few dance songs, some jazz numbers, but this was only the day after news from Europe that over a hundred American troops had been lost, and the atmosphere was too melancholy for people to respond to that kind of music.

So someone had fished out that old Tommy Dorsey record, and Steve could swear he had felt his heart crack right down the middle as soon as he heard the opening melody. The second verse had been even more painful to hear when Bucky was overseas, and he couldn’t help but shed a few tears right there in front of the bartender. 

_I’m aware_  
_My heart is a sad affair_  
_There’s much disillusion there_  
_But I can dream, can’t I_  
_Can’t I adore you_  
_Although we are oceans apart_  
_I can’t make you open your heart_  
_But I can dream, can’t I._

Steve blinks tears from his eyes, coming back to the present as the last notes fade into the air. He quietly closes the laptop.

Silence is painful in its own way, but it’s a familiar kind of hurt. 

He doesn’t realise he’s biting the inside of his cheek until the blood fills his mouth.

* * *

The next morning, he goes into the kitchen and opens the fridge as usual. He has a stock of high-calorie protein shakes that he uses to supplement his meals; technically he has the money to buy and cook extra food, but he feels guilty whenever he eats the absurd amount of calories his body requires in the form of actual meals.

He can’t forget the years of scraping together leftovers into a miserable slop that never quite deserved the name of stew, or his ma clenching her jaw as he told her he could just go round to Bucky’s place for dinner, and then she could have his portion. Everything about this new century’s attitude towards food seems so wasteful, especially when he thinks about people like Tony and Pepper, with their dinner parties and personal chefs - not that he’d ever say anything to them; he’s not that ungrateful.

He stares at the top shelf, where he keeps the bottled shakes. How many were there yesterday? They look as neatly lined up as ever, but he can’t help but feel like there’s one missing. Maybe even two.

His photographic memory only works when he’d actually looked at something, and grabbing a drink from the fridge is such an automatic move that he can’t even clearly remember doing it yesterday. His meals blend into each other; he doesn’t bother with much variety so it’s hard to pick out a particular day as being different unless he’s having dinner at the Tower.

There were definitely more shakes yesterday. Or were there? Maybe he’d woken up in the night and sleepwalked to the kitchen. And had a protein shake. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility; it’s not like he trusts his mind to be particularly reliable, these days.

He goes over to the bin and looks inside. There are no empty bottles on the top. 

He looks back at the fridge. He counts, saying each number under his breath. Ten. A nice even number. But had there been ten yesterday?

His hands are shaking, he notices. He leaves the protein shakes where they are and takes a twelve-pack of eggs out. He has to take a moment to breathe before he opens the box, but when he does it’s easy to see that the eggs are untouched. A perfect round dozen. Not a single crack to be seen.

* * *

Exactly a week goes by before the next time something feels off in his apartment. 

He’s been even more on edge than usual, and he knows that he isn’t hiding it well.

Time seems to crawl and fly by at the same time. He doesn’t spend all his time in the apartment, but his treks around New York have turned into aimless wanderings to keep himself occupied rather than any kind of sincere attempts to get to know the new-old city better.

He buys groceries from the same place every day, a little corner supermarket that looks tiny but is deceptively roomy on the inside. He mentions this observation to the lady who’s almost always on the checkout one time, in a vague attempt at practicing his small talk, and she laughs and says _sure is, honey, why did you think we put up a police box sign outside?_ He hopes that Natasha’s subterfuge training is paying off and that the checkout lady can’t see through his poker face to the confusion underneath. Probably another reference to something that holds no meaning for him

There still isn’t much variety in the food he buys. Everything is high-calorie and as cheap as he can find, and nothing requires too much preparation. He has all the time in the world, these days, to learn how to cook, but somehow it doesn’t hold much appeal anymore.

Natasha had promised to get in touch as soon as she needed his help to take down the last remnants of HYDRA, but so far he’s still waiting. 

Before he knows it, days have passed since he last stopped by the Tower. Surprisingly, it’s Tony that insists he come over for dinner one evening, sending a pointed reminder to the StarkPhone that Steve rarely touches - actually, he’s almost certain he’d switched it off a couple of days ago, which means that Tony’s message had somehow managed to remotely activate it and then send out annoying beeps until he read the invitation.

He still gets annoyed whenever people assume that he’s going to be suspicious of any new technological developments, but he can’t deny that some of the things Tony and Bruce talk about so casually - biometric identification, body-scanners, ways to recognise people just from their speech patterns or the way they talk - scare him in a way he doesn’t know how to articulate.

Steve rolls his eyes when he reads Tony’s very unsubtle message, and puts the cans of soup he’d been planning on heating up back in the cupboard.

He feels awkward at dinner at first, conscious that he hasn’t given his friends a good enough reason for his absence, but after a few well-meant digs from Tony about Steve needing to get laid - which is an odd expression - Pepper skilfully steers the conversation towards various charities that she’s involved in, asking Bruce and Steve for their opinions and genuinely seeming interested in what they have to say.

“You should come do some hospital visits with me, Cap,” Tony says. “For some reason the shy ones aren’t always big Iron Man fans, I have no idea why. They’d fall all over you.”

“Maybe,” Steve says noncommittally. He can’t really imagine spending time trying to cheer up sick children right now; he thinks it would probably test his very limited acting abilities even more than his USO days had done.

“Oh, Steve,” Pepper says, possibly sensing that he’s feeling uncomfortable with that line of conversation. “Natasha’s been in touch. She should be back in town sometime in the next couple of weeks.”

Steve ignores the small lurch in his stomach when he hears that. Natasha is - well, very good at reading people is putting it mildly. And he’s a little upset that she had messaged Pepper and Tony rather than him. “That’s great,” he says, praying it’s convincing. “Hopefully she’ll have some intel on what we need to do to make sure Hydra are wiped off the map for good.”

“I think she’s been focusing on the Winter Soldier rather than HYDRA in general,” Pepper replies, and Steve’s stomach decides to rebel again. As does his heart, which feels like it skips about five beats. “He seems to be the most unpredictable threat, and a lot of their regular agents were tracked down by the FBI after the files were leaked.”

“Oh,” he manages to say. “That makes sense.” It does, actually, and he can’t believe the thought hadn’t occurred to him before. “Do - did she say if she’d found anything?”

“She was annoyingly cryptic,” Tony interrupts. “I mean, duh, when is she not. But I’m - well, I’m kind of personally invested in this one, so it pissed me off a bit.”

“What Tony means to say is that he blew up her modified Widow’s Bite weapons,” Bruce says in a dry tone. 

“And spent the entire next three days making them even better, excuse me,” Tony says, and Steve needs to ask the question that feels like it’s going to poison him before the conversation gets derailed by talk of technological advances that sound like science fiction.

“Ah - Tony? Why would you be personally invested?”

Tony’s expression closes off, and Pepper bites her lip. Bruce looks calm, but he always does unless he’s about to turn into the Hulk.

Steve regrets asking, but now that it’s out there he needs to know.

“There’s evidence - buried under a pile of confusing Russian code, admittedly - that the Winter Soldier was the assassin that killed Tony’s parents,” Pepper tells him, looking apologetically at Tony.

No. It - it couldn’t have been. 

But Steve remembers the single-minded focus of the Soldier, the brutal determination to get his task done or die trying, and he knows very well that it could.

Something else occurs to him, though. He’d been given files on all his old acquaintances not long after he had come out of the ice, and he had flicked through them with blurred vision, pausing only on the dates and causes of death that were stamped on every page but one.

“I thought Howard and Maria died in a car crash,” he says, knowing that he should have stopped talking a while ago. 

He needs to know.

“That was the official story,” Tony says bitterly. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve finally says. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Howard was your friend,” Bruce points out. “Of course you wanted to know.”

And - that was true, though Steve had never felt particularly close to Howard. He can let the others think that was the only reason he would want to know, and they won’t ever question it.

After all, why would Captain America care more about his friend’s murderer than the friend himself?

* * *

He still feels that odd buzzing blankness around the edges of his mind - it’s becoming worryingly familiar, these days - when he gets back to his apartment. He grabs another protein shake, noting that the mental count he’s started keeping is still set at fourteen, now thirteen -

Wait. Hadn’t he put those soup cans back in the cupboard?

He rubs his knuckles along the countertop, hard enough to bruise the bone - only for a few seconds, of course, but it’s enough to focus his mind.

Bucky’s been here. He isn’t going to start doubting himself every second of every day. He’s got a photographic memory, for one thing. It could be someone else, he’s aware that the list of people who might want to hurt him isn’t exactly short.

He’s also spent some time talking to Natasha recently, and he’s absolutely certain that Bucky - if that’s who it is - could break in without leaving a trace of his presence if he wanted to. So there’s that.

He ignores the possibility that it’s the Soldier but that it isn’t Bucky.

He’s just going to wait. That’s one thing he knows how to do.

* * *

It takes four months. Steve had been hoping for maybe a few weeks at most, and as time goes by - with the occasional fridge magnet out of place - he settles into a not-quite-uncomfortable balance of hope and resignation.

He’s walking back after a long run through Prospect Park when he sees the door to his apartment is slightly open. He doesn’t pause, just keeps the same pace until he’s standing in his kitchen.

It’s been a couple of weeks with no little disturbances. Steve has no idea what Bucky - he hasn’t been able to bring himself to consider the possibility that isn’t who’s doing this for a while - does when he isn’t in Brooklyn, but Natasha had mentioned once that three suspected Hydra bases had mysteriously gone quiet over the past couple of months.

The kitchen looks exactly the same as when he left it. He goes through into the tiny living room, and sees a figure lying asleep on the sofa, boots still on, arm - the metal one - shielding his face.

He doesn’t know if Bucky is the right name for the man lying there. Doesn’t know why he’s here, what state of mind he’s in. 

And he doesn’t really care, if he’s being honest with himself. The road ahead is going to be a long one, he knows that.

But finally, he feels like this new world could be his home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve gets emo over Fall Out Boy because apparently that's where my brain went ? Also, I highly recommend listening to the beautiful song [I Can Dream, Can't I.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pto68TqHxKg)


	6. Epilogue

* * *

It’s been four weeks and no-one knows that Bucky’s living in Steve’s apartment.

Well. When he’s being realistic, Steve’s pretty sure that no-one has _confronted_ them about knowing. Natasha and Pepper were most like aware something was going on from the first day, but he guesses they either trust him enough to stay out of it or have half a dozen contingency and containment plans in place in case things go wrong.

Or both. Most likely both.

The two of them haven’t been talking much. Steve’s kept to his usual routine, and Bucky's fallen in with some aspects of it and ignored all the others. He isn't actually in the apartment all that often, and Steve still hasn't asked where else he goes.

He knows that at some point they’re going to have to get Bucky more help than this - Steve’s barely seen him sleep, and there have been more than a few occasions where Bucky’s looked at him without a spark of recognition in his eyes.

But it could be worse. It could be so, so much worse.

They’ve started cooking together sometimes, which feels both completely normal and utterly bizarre.

“Hey, you heard I can get married now?” Bucky asks, not looking up from the pot of rice that’s simmering on the stove.

Steve frowns down at the onion he’s cutting into the neatest squares he can manage. “What? You could always get married, you just never found the right girl.” He isn’t _not_ paying attention - hell, there’s never a moment when he’s unaware of where Bucky is in a room - but he doesn’t feel like this is a conversation that need that much of his attention, and he really wants to get this risotto right.

“Oh,” Bucky says, glancing sideways at Steve, biting the corner of his lip in a way that Steve tries very hard not to find distracting. “Sorry. I - I forgot he didn’t tell you.”

Steve stops cutting, because he feels like he’s missing some very important piece of a puzzle he’s been staring at for a while now. “He? And tell me what?”

Bucky looks down again, spins the knife he’s holding round in his hand, once, twice. Puts it down, picks it back up again. Steve tries to look like none of that bothers him. 

“Me, then,” Bucky says. “I never told you that I was - whatever. I guess I thought maybe you figured it out anyway.”

Steve starts chopping the onion again, very slowly, partly so that it gives him something to focus on, partly so that - as pathetic as it might be - he’ll have something to blame if a few of the tears prickling behind his eyelids end up falling.

“That you were what,” he says, not making it a question, because - there’s only one thing Bucky can mean, surely, after the question about marriage?

“That I’m queer,” Bucky says, his voice catching just the tiniest bit, and Steve feels like the most selfish person in the world right now, because this can’t be easy for Bucky, god, and here he is not thinking of anyone but himself.

Steve swallows, his throat tight. Opens his mouth, closes it again - what is he supposed to say? To do?

“I’m glad you can get married now,” he goes with, and he thinks it even comes out halfway to normal. 

Bucky goes silent for a few seconds, which isn’t unusual. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “Thanks. Me too, I guess.”

Steve wonders what he’d been expecting - hoping? - to hear.

“Shit,” Bucky says, reaching over and touching Steve’s hand, and -

And Steve jerks away.

Bucky looks at him. Steve fixes his eyes on the wall.

“I wasn’t -”

Bucky breaks off, makes a sound like he’s clenching his teeth together. He chews gum all the time these days, says he got used to chewing on the mouthguard Hydra gave him. Steve hates gum now. “You’re bleeding,” Bucky says, sounding frustrated, which - well, Steve can’t blame him for that. “I was just checking it wasn’t deep. That’s all.”

Steve looks down. Oh. He is bleeding. Not badly. He must have caught the edge of a finger with the knife; it isn’t like he’d been paying much attention.

He ruined their dinner, is all he can think, and it’s such a banal thought in the face of what the rest of his mind is doing that he almost wants to laugh at it. 

He doesn’t. That wouldn’t exactly be the best reaction right now, he’s pretty sure.

“Steve?”

Bucky sounds - gentle, maybe. And that’s a thought Steve can’t bear, which he doesn’t want to admit to himself.

“It’ll heal,” he says numbly, and he bites down on his cheek until that bleeds too, until every part of him feels like it’s bleeding, and he leaves, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

* * *

“I’m sorry,” he says later. Almost under his breath, but he knows Bucky can hear him. 

They used to play a game, back in the army, where they’d try to have whole conversations without any of the Commandos catching up. They’d almost never succeeded; not because their hearing hadn’t been good enough, but because Steve was terrible at keeping up any kind of poker face, especially around Bucky.

“Right,” Bucky says at a normal volume. “For?”

They’re side by side on the couch, not touching but close enough to. The TV’s on but Steve doesn’t have a clue what show’s playing. Bucky doesn’t seem all that comfortable in silence anymore; he tends to switch on the TV or the radio without seeming to care what the program actually is.

Steve clenches his fist a little, just enough so he can feel his nails digging into his palms, and then slowly, very deliberately, relaxes it and reaches out.

Bucky turns to him. Steve can’t read his expression - hope, maybe? - and he doesn’t try too hard. He just leaves his hand where it is.

And Bucky takes it.

“You always were bad at using your words, Rogers,” Bucky says, with affection in his voice that makes Steve’s chest ache.

He takes a quick breath, trying to slow his heartrate. He’s in no doubt that Bucky’s able to pick up on something like that. “Pretty sure when Ma said that she was talking about me trying to punch out guys twice my size, not holding someone’s hand.”

It comes out more honest than he means it to, and he knows Bucky can sense what he isn’t saying.

“She wanted you to be happy,” Bucky says quietly. “I don’t remember much, but I know that.”

Steve looks down at their hands, linked together a little awkwardly, and smiles. “She did,” he says, and even as he says it he feels the truth of the words echo inside him. 

He’ll never know quite what Sarah would have thought of this, whatever this is. But he knows she loved him, and that she loved Bucky, and that she wanted them both to find happiness.

That’s what counts, he decides, and he doesn’t let go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is very very welcome! I loved writing for the RBB but I may have rushed a tiny bit to hit the deadline, so if anything doesn't fully make sense feel free to let me know! Thanks so much for reading <3
> 
> And don't forget to [reblog Lena's wonderful art](http://portraitoftheoddity.tumblr.com/post/161938188754/should-have-been-me-why-was-i-the-one-spared-it) if you have a tumblr!


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